Teqlo promises to take Web 2.0 applications to the next level by automating the sequencing of events in mashups

Jacoby Thwaites, founder and CTO of Teqlo, is an Englishman who clearly believes in what he is doing, even to the point of boldly turning what has always been considered a negative in Silicon Valley into a positive.

"We had a big problem. We were a solution in search of a problem to solve," Thwaites tells InfoWorld.

The solution in this case is called the Teqlo engine and until Web 2.0 and mashups came on the scene, Teqlo had nowhere to go.

Teqlo falls in the broad category of mashup platform. Thwaites' technology scopes out Web applications, figuring out from their APIs how they might pass data to one another, enabling mashup builders to pull together a composite application on a graphical "canvas."

Almost all current mashups have just a one-step interaction or point of integration -- Google maps integrates with Salesforce.com sales leads, for example. Teqlo enables complex mashups. Users can cherry-pick the features they want from many applications and aggregate them into something new. The system builds on the middleware concept of consumers and producers and adds automatically generated events.

For example, a company may have an application that wants an address for a credit lookup. At the same time there might be an application that produces the loan applicant's full name and a third application that has a contact database which is able to take the name and add an address.

With the Teqlo engine, a user can drop these three systems into the mix, in any order, and whenever a name is produced by one of those systems the second application is automatically told to look up the address and go to the third application, the requester of the information.

At the end of the day, says Thwaites, all each application needs to do is self-describe its capability and the Teqlo engine does the rest. The intellectual property behind the engine is similar to that of a routing algorithm from a router, but instead of routing IP packets, Teqlo routes (or actually sequences) events.

VC funding was difficult at first because potential investors could not see the business angle. When Teqlo finally came up with a specific application that it created for Salesforce.com users, the light dawned.

The Teqlo site currently has 3,000 users and the business model behind Teqlo is to provide specific markets with specific applications, currently oriented toward sales activities.

"The first official Teqlo application will combine Salesforce.com widgets with Outlook, Plaxo, and BlackBerry integration," Thwaites says.